positive thinking tip: When you feel worried or doubtful, dig a trench.
I remember the days when my husband and I were trying to live on about $1200/month. We were both working full time and fighting a losing battle to stay afloat.
We listened to motivational audios that urged us to believe in our dreams, and we knew that we could have any kind of life we really wanted, but when it came right down to it, it was always impossible to see where any extra money would ever come from.
I can see now that at the time, having faith in the face of scarcity was an impossible expectation. Here’s why:
The thing that made it so difficult is that we knew exactly how much money we were getting, and we also knew just how much our expenses exceeded that income.
If true financial success cannot be achieved without at least some degree of FAITH (believing in something without tangible evidence), how in the world is a person supposed to have that kind of faith when all evidence proves that it’s utterly impossible?
I learned that there are three things that, over the years, helped me build that necessary faith.
- Continuing Education – learning new marketable skills and studying the laws of success
- Work – investing time, money, and energy in other income streams outside of our regular jobs. (Even when they didn’t produce a profit – and they didn’t – for nearly 10 years!)
- Choosing to Believe in God, and believing that He was interested in our success – and trusting that it was being orchestrated, if we’d just kept moving our feet.
For nearly a decade, we worked and studied and worked some more. We believed the abundance would have to find us sometime, if we just kept trying.
It makes me think about the early settlers of my desert region:
There were a lot of ditches to dig and canals to build before they were prepared to utilize a flow of water. I’m sure it took many, many years to put those systems in place.
As you explore your talents and look for new ways to monetize them, just picture yourself digging ditches and building canals. It’s so easy to think that a massive, sudden flow of money would solve all of your problems, but in reality, that gush could be just as devastating as a flash flood in a valley where the settlers are trying to create a system for a steady, constant supply of water instead.
You don’t want the gush until your systems are in place!
It dawned on me that after my husband took the leap toward full-time self-employment (when we really couldn’t predict exactly where the money would come from like we could when we had a regular paycheck), the more trenches we dug, the easier it was to have faith in God.
Isn’t that interesting?
Having put forth so much unrewarded effort for so long, in the face of scarcity, instead of saying, “I can’t think of a single place the money could come from,” we could more easily say, “The water could come from any one of the hundreds of trenches we dug all those years!”
Compared to our first few years together, how much easier it now was to finally believe! How much easier it was to have faith! And faith is the critical element. All the work in the world without faith can be just as useless as all the faith you can muster without work.
As they say, “Faith without works is dead.” Truly without some personal effort, faith is meaningless. Why? Because you demonstrate your faith BY working! You’re proving your belief in the abundant life by putting forth the effort to get those money-making systems in place.
And, when faith is low, work can help it grow, too. This is why the unexpected cure for doubt in my opinion is: Education, and WORK.
If you can’t think of where to get the money you need, shift your focus to increasing your knowledge, and get to work finding some kind of meaningful services you can perform for others.
God did not bring you this far to fail now… stay in forward motion. Your reward is waiting for you!
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I’ve had a few challenges this week… character building experiences… and there is one phrase that, for a couple days, kept coming to mind at least once an hour. A good friend and mentor of mine named Ken Pierce gave me this advice many years ago. At times when I have been in a slump, discouraged by a perceived lack of progress, or when my objectives keep meeting with obstacles, the words “never say whoa in a mud hole” continue to return to my mind.
